Is Mobile Colours a function of it's Operating System?

[Big-G]

Is the Number of Colours of the screen a function of the operating system of the mobile ?

I mean I have often ( though not confirmed ) observed that mobiles running on Windows Mobile OS have a screen resolution of just 65K colours unlike those running on Symbian OS which presently goes upto 16.7 Millon colours.

Is it something analogous to the limitations of the Operating system a la a 32 bit OS can't address more than 4 GB of Ram and in order to utlize more RAm one needs to upgrade to a 64 bit OS .

Or is it just the manufacturer's will that he decides how many colours he choses to offer?


Seems to me , the OS limitation .

What is the theoritcal maximum limitation of the maximum number of colours and also PIXEL COUNT that can be offered per unit size of the screen , for various operating systems on mobile phones

[gforce23]

Yep, WinMo 6.1 can display 16 bits only while theoretically, the screens in the Touch HD, Omnia and Xperia can support 262K or even 16M. WinMo 7 is expected to resolve this issue.

For dumbphones, this limit depends on the LCDs used by the manufacturer. Nokia and Samsung have been using 16M for quite some time. SE just recently announced that it would start manufacturing screens with 16M.

AFAIK:
S60 and the new SF-OS, UIQ, iPhoneOS, Linux, BB OS: 16M
Android & WinMo: 65K

[dreamcatcher]

Ok.Here goes.WM supports all amounts of color bits.65k colors or 16 bit color is used in WM for a particular reason. WM is a memory hogger and lacks basic functionalities such as vector graphics and has a fixed native resolution. Running a task in a WM mobile takes about 50% more memory than that used in, say a Symbian. As a resulut of which, if you put more bits into the coloring front, say 16 mil or 24 bit colors, you need a more powerful CPU that developers find inappropriate at this moment.

To incorporate a 16m screen you have to have a proccy that shells out speeds of more than 600 MHz and slows down the other processes in turn. Also, the amount of free RAM gets clogged.Thus a simple Wm device, due to the incresed machinery inside would cost a bomb to deliver=phail.

Thus WM devics generally deliver less colors but with a higher resolution screen, namely the XPERIA with a resolution of 800x640, which results in increased pixel density and thus kind of makes up for the lack of colors.

[gforce23]

Originally Posted by dreamcatcher

Thus WM devics generally deliver less colors but with a higher resolution screen, namely the XPERIA with a resolution of 800x640, which results in increased pixel density and thus kind of makes up for the lack of colors.

800*640?? What's this - the Xperia X2?

The higher res displays that you're talking about were introduced very recently. In fact, up until the end of last year, almost every WinMo had a traditional QVGA display. I think the HTC Diamond was the first one to break the mold and hit VGA resolution. There are only 3 phones on the market toting WVGA (800x480) screens: the HTC Kovsky (X1), HTC Blackstone (Touch HD) and Quartz (Touch 4G WiMax).